[Rev] End of Month Reviews - Jan 2004

[Jason Kenney]

For starters, I want to thank ya, Saxon, for reviewing stuff at RACC. 
I don't think anyone ever really appreciates what reviewers really do
and I just want to say thanks for reading and sharing your opinion. 
I'm bad about doing that myself.

But I want to especially thank ya for reviewing an Artifice Comics
release, being a writer for the site and promoter and all.

Now, the review...

> Anthology 2
> An Artifice Comics [AC] anthology series
> 'Johann Weisz, Magenta: Everything Dies (Lost Legacies Part I)'
> By Matthew Cavazos 
> 
>      A combination of personal taste and focusing on other imprints means 
> I haven't gotten into Artfice Comics. Usually I only skim the occasional 
> AC title in case there's something that might interest me, and perhaps 
> prompt me to go back and read some previous issues. However with only one 
> LNH title this month I thought I'd try to pad out the post, and AC is the 
> only other imprint that's been active this month. In fact, Artifice Comics 
> has posted 4 stories in January 2004, leading me off on a tangent to muse 
> about the irony of how the Rabbit Breeders Cup Award at the RACCies is 
> given out to individuals rather than entire imprints. Incidentally, has 
> anybody else been having trouble accessing the Artifice Comics webpage?

The AC website was down for a good chunk of last month due to server
issues, but it's back now.  We're still kinda recovering but it's
there.  Artifice kinda strives to have at least a release a week, even
if that ends up being three releases in one month by one author (hey,
it happens, I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about from personal
experience).  We may sometimes fail to post the stories here at RACC
(the EiC is bad about posting his own stories, he's not a big fan of
any sort of recognition to which I say fooey on him) but we're
churning stuff out all the time.  But thanks for taking your time to
check out an AC book and I hope you check out more (especially Bush43,
read Bush43, all must read Bush43, it builds character).

>      In any case, the magician Johann Weisz is in a park reading residual 
> energies from a battle when the arrival of an angel temporarily blinds 
> him, and he's taken back to his old home to be told something about his 
> destiny by his dead mother.

Yeah, part of the motivation for this is that the story is part of the
"Lost Legacies" clump that has come out over the last few weeks where
current AC characters are supposed to kinda look back or give some
sort of broader insight into the AC universe.  Part of this is to lay
out the groundwork for the upcoming Artifice America expansion from
the site in April/May.

(snip)

>      One problem I did have was with the speech of the angel, which was 
> indicated only by context rather than with quote marks or suchlike. 
> Unfortunately, partway through the story the narration shifts from third 
> person to first person narration from Johann and then back again towards 
> the end. Trying to differentiate the angel's speech from Johann's first 
> person account interrupted the flow of the story for me.

Now, not knowing exactly what was up on the author's end, I think this
is probably explained as a formatting issue.  We're primarily webbased
so the story was formatted on the website with the Angel's words in
italics, something that didn't translate well to simple text.  Yeah,
we should have probably done a bit of editing to help make that more
understandable, something for us to look into in the future.

But thanks for the review, Saxon, and I hope you continue to check out
some other Artifice books (I highly recomend anything with Bill
Castonzo's name on it, amazing work there).

Jason Kenney
B43 writer, one of many Artifice promoters, dude
http://www.artificecomics.com